The
breezy, irreverent essays in Adios, Barbie [Body Outlaws]
are a welcome antidote to the narrow cultural consciousness
the tiny doll has fostered for more than 40 years. While thousands
of little girls worship Barbie's plasticine perfection, those
who wind up dissatisfied with the message she sends--be white,
be skinny, be stacked, be pretty, and then you'll be loved--can
tell you how a toy skews body image in the real world. Among
whites talking trash about blacks and upwardly mobile black
folks, notes Erin J. Aubry, big butts are suspect--"low-class
and ghettoish," the antithesis of Barbie's tightly tucked
derriere. Yet on good days, Aubry applauds her ample proportions,
for "unlike hair or skin, the butt is stubborn, immutable--it
can't be hot-combed or straightened or bleached into submission.
It does not assimilate; it never took a slave name."

In
"Fishnets, Feather Boas, and Fat," Nomy Lam--a 250-pound,
22-year-old disabled woman--and friends elbow their way to
the front of a determinedly different club, "dancing
like fiends toward revolution." Lee Damsky tells us why
her mother's model of scientific prowess took a dusty third-place
to big-screen images of "beauty and femininity [that]
seem to offer me absolute power rivaled only by a fascist
dictatorship." Because the various writers gathered together
here are young, their conceits and world-views are sometimes
annoyingly unexamined; by the same token, though, their energy,
heckling, and bone-deep assurance make large and pleasing
dents in mainstream assumptions. (Francesca Coltrera)